The Bin Ladens Read online

  There is no evidence from any source—no document, no interview—to suggest that Osama ever met an American intelligence officer. The only American of any kind whom he is known to have greeted personally—apart, perhaps, from Bin Laden family members and other Arab acquaintances who carried American passports—is George Harrington, the ultralight salesman and accidental adventurer from San Antonio who accompanied Salem to Peshawar in early 1985. Nonetheless, whether he was aware of it or not, Osama’s logistics and construction work along the Pakistan border, starting in 1986, intersected with CIA programs and funding. The agency’s logistics and construction units, working through Pakistani intelligence, provided cement and other materials for the caves and storage facilities that Afghan commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar built along the border during this period. Osama’s construction with Bin Laden family equipment certainly complemented these projects, and he may well have participated in them. Moreover, after 1986, Haqqani became what intelligence officers refer to as a “unilateral” asset of the CIA, meaning that he received tens of thousands of dollars in cash directly from CIA officers working undercover in Pakistan, without any mediation by Pakistani intelligence, which normally handled and relayed the great majority of CIA funds to the Afghans. Haqqani had multiple sources of cash but the CIA payments were sizable. Haqqani, in turn, helped and protected Osama and the Arab volunteers as they built their nascent militia. (Osama later referred to Haqqani as a “hero mujahid sheikh” and “one of the foremost leaders of the jihad against the Soviets.”) Haqqani traveled frequently to Peshawar to meet with a Pakistani and, separately, with an American intelligence officer, and to pick up supplies. Osama would have had no reason to know about Haqqani’s opportunistic work with the CIA, but he and his Arab volunteers benefited from it. They stood apart from the CIA’s cash-laden tradecraft—but just barely.19

  Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government, by comparison, were open and routine. Badeeb maintained offices for the Saudi intelligence service at the Saudi embassy in Islamabad and sleeping quarters in Saudi-funded charities in Peshawar. These charities, in turn, funneled contributions to the Services Office. Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine praised the support of seven charities in its December 1986 issue; these included the Red Crescent of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim World League, the large Mecca-based charity. Badeeb visited Pakistan as often as once a month. Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi intelligence, also traveled there regularly. Their host in Islamabad was Yousef Mottakbani, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, a clean-shaven professional who kept a photograph of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on the wall in his living room. Mottakbani channeled funds from both Saudi intelligence and from private charities to favored Afghan clients, including Haqqani, according to a former American envoy who participated in the covert program. Mottakbani hosted dinner parties in Islamabad at which Osama was a regular guest. Turki met him at these soirees and in Peshawar. He found Osama “shy, friendly, and almost gentle. He always spoke in a low voice; he was a man of pithy statements.”20

  Turki and other senior Saudi officials, such as Prince Bandar, later said their government had little direct involvement with Osama during this period. Turki characterized Osama as a volunteer from a respectable family who was an “interesting figure” but not an instrument of Saudi tradecraft. By Turki’s account, unlike the CIA, Saudi intelligence, which is known by the acronym GID, never deviated from its pledge to funnel money to the Afghans only through the Pakistani intelligence service, known as ISI. “Abdullah Azzam was never supported by me or the GID,” Turki wrote later. “GID stuck to its agreement…that support for the Mujaheddin would be distributed according to their effectiveness, which was measured by the ISI and then evaluated by both the CIA and GID. Sayyaf consistently came in fifth or sixth place.”21

  Turki’s account leaves ambiguous whether, separately from Azzam, Saudi intelligence provided direct funding to Bin Laden, particularly after he moved away from Azzam and began to build infrastructure along the Pakistan border. Some of Osama’s own followers have said that he did receive direct aid from Saudi intelligence. Abu Musab Al-Suri, a longtime colleague and later an important Al Qaeda ideologist, has written, “It is a big lie that the Afghan Arabs were formed with the backing of the CIA…The truth is that Saudi intelligence agencies did have involvement with Bin Laden, and elements of their apparatus did send assistance from Saudi Arabia.”22

  Ahmed Badeeb, the former Al-Thaghr biology teacher and Turki’s chief of staff, has provided the fullest inside account of Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government during this period:

  He had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan. The nature of this relation with Saudi intelligence was because the Saudi embassy in Pakistan had a very powerful and active role…When persons came from the Kingdom to present assistance, the ambassador would hold dinner parties and invite people, and due to Osama bin Laden’s family and personal contacts, he would be invited as well. He had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask Osama bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively…[Also,] the Pakistanis saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.23

  In a broad sense, then, Osama had come to enjoy relations with the Saudi royal family and its intelligence service quite similar to those cultivated with other sectors of the government by his half-brothers: Osama’s connections were social, but girded and constrained by his role as a construction contractor; they were respectful and solicitous; and Osama’s honorable place at court was reaffirmed periodically in the formal settings of an embassy salon. Unlike his half-brothers, however, he did not return from these rather orthodox Arabian gatherings to a conventional Saudi home, to watch television or smoke a water pipe on the patio. Instead, Osama rolled back down the Grand Trunk Road in his four-wheel-drive vehicles, through Peshawar, and then up rocky roads to the barren encampments, just inside Afghanistan, where he led his small incubating cult of martyrdom.

  21. OFF THE BOOKS

  BY THE MID-1980S, Jim Bath, Salem’s partner in Houston, who had arrived in the city three decades earlier with hardly a dollar to his name, had acquired many of the accessories of a successful Texas adventurer: a pair of .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, a Westchester high-powered rifle with a scope, a Winchester bolt-action rifle, a BMW 525 automobile, and a Rallye Minerva airplane. He owned interests in a number of residential and investment properties around Houston; these included hotel projects, apartment houses, an airport parking garage, a Denny’s restaurant, and a ranch in Liberty County. From offices on several floors of the Fannin Bank Building downtown, he oversaw his aircraft brokerage company, Bin Laden family business entities, his own scattered investments (which included $50,000 he had sunk into an oil-drilling fund run by George W. Bush, his friend from the Texas Air National Guard), and an aircraft leasing company called Skyway Aircraft, which was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and controlled by Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Bath and his wife Sandra still lived immediately behind Khalid’s enormous estate in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. All in all, Bath presented a grand facade. But it was little more than that; in truth, his life was unraveling.1

  Bath jetted around the world with his Arab clients and other oil industry friends—to Caribbean tax havens, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. One of the leased oil company jets he occasionally flew on had a bed with a mink throw on it, and it was there that he first met Mary Ellen Lewis, a married air hostess, according to Sheryl Johnson-Todd, an attorney who represented two of Bath’s wives in subsequent divorce proceedings. Over the course of their long, tumultuous affair, Bath provided Mary Ellen with a Cadillac, transferred money to her and her husband, and fathered a child with her out of wedlock. After Sandra discovered the relationship, she later testified, anonymous postcards arrived at her home in River Oaks; the cards accused Sandra of clinging to an opportunistic marriage like the fict
ional one between J.R. and Sue Ellen in the prime-time television soap opera Dallas. Ultimately, Sandra learned about Bath’s child with Lewis when her husband pulled up to their house one day in a convertible with a little girl asleep in the passenger seat; according to Sandra, Jim Bath asked if she would please raise the child. She filed for divorce instead. Sandra alleged in court filings that Bath abused drugs; he denied her allegations. According to an affidavit by Bath, Mary Ellen Lewis eventually became no happier with him; she “made threats to blow my head off and to kill me.”2

  Bath’s affair with Lewis may not have been the only secret he harbored during his last years of working with the Bin Laden family. According to a 1990 court filing by Bath’s estranged business partner Bill White, Bath “indicated that he was working as a CIA operative” during a conversation they held in 1982. By White’s account, Bath said he had been introduced to the CIA when the elder George Bush was its director, during the late 1970s, and that he had been asked to conduct “covert intelligence gathering on his Saudi Arabian business associates.” According to him, Bath said that he had been asked to undertake certain sensitive air-transport operations. After a series of scandals during the 1970s, the CIA had allegedly decided to privatize some of its covert air-transport operations, and the agency had been looking for reliable Americans with security clearances who might take on some of this work under contract. As a former air force pilot who was friendly with the younger Bush, Bath was a natural candidate for such a role, according to White, who was himself a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and a former navy fighter pilot. White came to believe that Bath had used some of his offshore charter aircraft businesses to help ship construction equipment and possibly weapons to Osama Bin Laden on the Afghan frontier during the late 1980s.3

  Jim Bath has spoken sparsely and infrequently about his business and chartered aviation endeavors during the 1980s. (He declined to be interviewed for this book.) In a court filing from that period, he seemed to mock all White’s allegations about their business disputes, arguing that his former business partner suffered from “paranoia” and “demonstrated frequent mood swings.” According to Bath, White believed that “those conspiring against him were engaged in ‘covert communications’ and had ‘secret agendas’ against him.” In 1991 Bath told Time that White’s account about his supposed intelligence work was “fantasy” and that he was “not a member of the CIA or any other intelligence agency.” About a decade later, however, in an interview with the journalist Craig Unger, Bath seemed to suggest that there might be some degree of truth in White’s portrayal. Speaking of the CIA, Bath said, “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation.” He seemed to be referring to the voluntary cooperation sometimes offered to the agency by American businessmen with sensitive foreign contacts. Indeed, the CIA ran a station in Houston to facilitate informal interviews with Americans who worked in the international oil industry. If Bath did have agency connections, it is possible that all he did was report occasionally on what he picked up while consorting with the Bin Ladens, Bin Mahfouz, and other Saudis.4

  White failed in his lawsuits against Bath and suffered heavy financial losses. He had an honorable military career before his troubles with Bath, but his credibility is difficult to judge. There is no evidence apart from his statements that Bath ran contract operations for the CIA. Nonetheless, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Bath did travel frequently to Caribbean tax havens during this period, according to Sandra’s divorce attorney, and he crossed borders carrying large amounts of cash, she said.5 Bath certainly had the means to support discreet international air operations if he wished, if not for the United States, then perhaps for his Saudi business clients. Salem frequently used his larger private aircraft as makeshift cargo transporters during this period, and it is conceivable, for example, that Salem or Bath might have used one of these planes, or one of the other large jets owned by some of Salem’s Saudi associates, to move weapons from South America or South Africa to aid Osama in Pakistan. This is merely conjecture, however; none of the individuals interviewed about Salem’s involvement in private arms transactions on Osama’s behalf understood how the weapons were to be shipped.

  Salem flitted lightly and evasively through these spheres of intrigue, but his style was more Austin Powers than James Bond. Apart from the court filings and statements by White, there are additional fragments of evidence about Salem’s possible connections to conservative American political circles that were active in covert anti-communist operations during the 1980s. For example, according to flight logs, Larry McDonald, the Georgia congressman and president of the John Birch Society, flew on one of Salem’s private jets in Saudi Arabia just months before McDonald died aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down on September 1, 1983, after it strayed into Soviet airspace. Jim Bath’s connections to the Bush family and other leading figures in the Reagan-era Republican Party in Texas have continued to raise questions about the extent of Salem’s relations with these politicians. White, for example, has alleged that Bath used Bin Laden money when investing in Bush’s Arbusto drilling fund, a charge that Bath and Bush have adamantly denied. At a minimum—through Jim Bath, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, and the Saudi government—Salem could justifiably regard himself as an ex officio member of the Houston oil and political establishment; he was draped in both its finery and its perpetual culture of mysterious deal making. Vinson and Elkins, one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, represented Salem. He owned a private airport in the city. He dined at River Oaks mansions and played with visiting Saudi royalty.6

  In time, however, Bath’s accumulating personal and financial troubles seemed to alienate him from Salem. There were limits to how much craziness even Salem was prepared to tolerate. In 1986 Bath fell into a financial dispute with White involving allegations that he had improperly used a certificate of deposit belonging to Skyway Aircraft as collateral at a Houston bank for a $550,000 personal loan. Later that year, according to White’s court filings, the Houston Police Department contacted White and told him they were investigating Bath in an international drug case; no charges were ever brought against him, however. According to Gail Freeman, the Bin Laden family friend and occasional business partner, Salem’s beloved half-sister Randa also became estranged from the Baths during this period. She felt the Baths had treated her rudely, according to Freeman, and Randa then seemed to influence Salem’s attitude toward his longtime Houston partner.7

  An era was ending, and Bath’s troubles reflected its eclipse. In 1986 oil prices fell to a record low of nine dollars per barrel. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Texas shuddered simultaneously. The real estate boom in Houston gradually imploded. That autumn, as Osama was organizing his first militia training camp on the Afghan frontier, the Iran-Contra scandal broke into the open, and the subsequent investigations dragged some of the uncomfortable history of off-the-books dealings between Reagan and King Fahd into the headlines. The adhesives that had held Salem’s multiple worlds together for a decade—spouting oil money, a confident and often secretive alliance between Washington and Riyadh, and an ethos of cultural mobility and play—began to come apart.

  OSAMA’S SMALL BAND of fighters suffered through a bitter winter in the high mountains around Jaji. The war usually went into hiatus during the snowy season. When the thaw arrived, so did Soviet soldiers. Osama’s rumbling bulldozers had created a provocation in an important battle zone that the Soviets were not about to ignore. Osama’s friend and brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa had visited the Lion’s Den and found it to be a death trap. That was the point, some of Osama’s colleagues told him: “We have plenty of shaheeds,” or “martyrs,” whose sacrifices would please God. Khalifa said he argued with Osama that this waste of life violated Islamic precepts and that “God will ask you about it in the hereafter.” Osama ignored his warning.8

  The fighting began in April of 1987. Osama’s volunteers clashed for a week with Soviet forces; this initial engagement was
followed by a longer battle the next month. Bin Laden’s positions came under sustained aerial bombardment; the Soviets may have used incendiary weapons similar to napalm. Spetsnaz troops raided Bin Laden’s fortified encampments; the Arab volunteers, although lightly trained and little experienced, fought back fiercely in close engagements. Precisely what happened during these battles would become obscured over the years by retrospective accounts from self-mythologizing jihadis; their versions are sometimes contradictory. The earliest known published description, in Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine, does not emphasize Osama’s role in the battles, but concentrates instead on the heroics of one of his Egyptian military aides; Osama was not even mentioned. He soon painted himself into the picture, however, by giving effusive interviews about his experiences to sympathetic Arab journalists. There is no doubt about the basic facts. The Jaji battles of 1987 were intense, with significant casualties on both sides, but they did nothing to alter the course of the larger war. Osama was present, and he performed honorably under heavy pressure. The battles seem to have left him with two main reactions: they endowed his belief that he had been called to war in God’s name with fresh and deep emotion, and they struck him as an outstanding marketing opportunity.9